Discussions will always happen, I agree on this. But if there are frequent frictions caused by different philosophy and vision about OFBiz, as I think is happening recently, then in my opinion we should try, all together, to address them. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and trying to identify the patterns around the discussions, in order to try to identify a better way of addressing them. I think I have identified the following reactions to commits containing code that is not accepted by everyone: 1) harsh discussions, personal attacks etc... 2) discussions on very specific technical details of the commits 3) definition of "policies" in the attempt of defining rules to prevent similar commits to happen again in the future
Even if everyone will (hopefully) agree that #1 is not the way to go, I think that the past experience is clearly showing that sometimes #2 and #3 are not useful as well. #2 is good to address very specific issues, but if there are very different ideas on how the project should be managed (e.g. how stable the trunk should be; if it is more important to have new features or to have a clean product; if it is important to try to implement modularity or not etc...) then we will always have committers discussing on commits that look completely wrong to them. Also, I don't like the way "policies" have been used: they are growing and becoming more and more complex, raising the bar for new contributions and committers and making the development effort and participation to project discussion less pleasant (we are more focused on form rather than content). I think that policies are useless if we don't share a common ground, and if we all share it, then most of them will be obvious to everyone or not even required. Sorry for the long post... all in all what I want to say is that we should probably spend some good time finding an agreement on the general philosophy and goals (code quality, features, freedom, standardization, framework separation etc...) for the project and how to implement them. Kind regards, Jacopo On Feb 4, 2010, at 4:53 PM, Adrian Crum wrote: > Why do you feel you need to solve anything? Let the players sort things out > for themselves. > > There will always be disagreements in the community. Within the community we > have design philosophy differences and cultural differences. Those > differences have to be discussed and resolved. There is no need for you to > "solve" that. > > -Adrian > > David E Jones wrote: >> I don't know how to solve these problems with community interactions, or by >> another way of looking at it I don't know what we can do to work together >> better. I've tried a few times to defend people being attacked, or try to >> point out hopefully more effective ways of doing things. Every time I just >> get personally attacked in response. I know that doing this is not the role >> of the PMC Chair, but I've been trying anyway and obviously completely >> failing and my efforts seem to be doing more harm than good, or that is the >> feedback I've been seeing. It's great that OFBiz has become what it has in >> spite of my inability to foster growth and collaboration in the community, >> and I hope that it will continue to grow and do so because of the nature of >> the project and community. I really have hope that it will, in spite of what >> I'm about to write...
